Reflections on Ellen Schrecker and
Maurice Isserman's essay, "The Right's Cold War Revision"

by John Earl Haynes

Ellen Schrecker and Maurice Isserman's essay, "The Right's Cold War
Revision" (The Nation, 24/32 July 2000) deserves a serious
response. In regard to the history of American communism the essay demonstrates
a significant shift by two major left historians; but in regard to the history
of American anticommunism, however, little has changed. The two issues are
inextricably mixed and as welcome as movement on the first matter is, the
immobility on the second shows the still yawning gap between their perspective
and mine.

Isserman and Schrecker are leading figures of the revisionist view of
American communism that has dominated academic history from the 1970s to the
late 1990s. (`Revisionist' as opposed to the `traditionalist' interpretation of
the late 1950s and 1960s most prominently identified with Theodore Draper.) In
the revisionist perspective the ties between the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA)
and the USSR were minimized and treated as largely irrelevant to its chief
activities. To the extent the issue was even addressed, and often it was not,
the CPUSA as an institution was judged as not involved in Soviet espionage and,
at most, only a few individual Communists cooperated with Soviet intelligence.
Revisionists treated most of those accused in the late 1940s and 1950s of
participation in Soviet espionage as innocents maligned by wicked perjurers
egged on by American security agencies eager to frame Communists for crimes
they did not commit. Schrecker and Isserman recognize that the evidence that
has emerged since the collapse of the USSR has rendered this view untenable.
This is to their credit in as much as too many historians, including leading
figures in the profession and its chief journals, corrupted by a combination of
ideological myopia and partisanship along with a measure of incompetence, have
averted their eyes and pretended that the new evidence changes nothing.

In this essay Isserman and Schrecker state that the CPUSA had a dual nature,
that it was "a rigid, secretive and undemocratic sect whose leaders
followed the Soviet line and recruited for the KGB ... [that] was also -- and
at the same time -- the most dynamic organization on the American left... For
better and worse-- it was the vehicle through which hundreds of
thousands of Americans sought to create a more democratic and egalitarian
society." They also write "it is now abundantly clear that most of
those who were identified as Soviet agents in the forties and fifties really
were -- and that most of them belonged to the Communist Party" and
"as Venona and the Moscow sources reveal, the party recruited dozens,
perhaps hundreds, of its members to spy for the Soviet Union."

While not fully coinciding, their dual view of the CPUSA has parallels with
Harvey Klehr and my statement in our 1995 The Secret World of American
Communism that "there were many worlds of American Communism,"
including a public one where the party "devoted its energies to organizing
workers into trade unions, opposing segregation,... and pursuing a myriad other
causes and crusades. Most party members lived in that public world of American
communism. They had no connection with, or even knowledge of, another
world." But there was also a secret world where the party "was also a
conspiracy financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for
clandestine work, developed an elaborate underground apparatus, and used that
apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power." In our
1998 The Soviet World of American Communism we commented that "to
say that the American Communist party was `nothing but' an appendage of a
Soviet-dominated Communist International would be an exaggeration. From the
party's inception, several hundred thousand Americans have joined out of a
deeply felt belief in the necessity of overturning America's economic and
political order and establishing a new society based on Marxism-Leninism. But
the CPUSA has always also been a satellite, first of the Comintern and later of
the Soviet Communist party." And in our 1999 Venona: Decoding Soviet
Espionage in America we commented that despite the evidence of the CPUSA's
deep involvement in Soviet espionage "to say that the CPUSA was nothing
but a Soviet fifth column in the Cold war would be an exaggeration; it still
remains true that the CPUSA's chief task was the promotion of communism and the
interests of the Soviet Union through political means."

Schrecker and Isserman wish not to note the partial overlap of their new
position with ours. (In her 1998 Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
Schrecker presented a more detailed version of this dual analysis of the
CPUSA.) They insist that we "reduce the entire history of ... [the
Communist] movement to a criminal conspiracy." In the eyes of Isserman and
Schrecker we likely put too little emphasis on what they regard as the CPUSA's
positive side, but their characterization of our views is a caricature.

That aside, Isserman and Schrecker's new position is a major advance over
the "uncritical filiopietism," to use their own term, that too often
permeated the revisionist version of the history of American communism. There
still remain, however, issues both of fact and interpretation regarding the
history of American communism that Schrecker and Isserman avoid confronting.

The factual issues that need to be directly addressed are several, of which
only a partial listing includes the following. The CPUSA's abandonment of
hundreds (probably more than a thousand) of former members who had emigrated to
the USSR in the 1920s and early 1930s and who fell victim to Stalin's terror in
the mid-30s, either secretly executed or imprisoned in the Gulag. This
abandonment was more than the passive act of pretending it didn't happen but
actively justifying the purges and seeking to discredit those who tried to tell
the truth. The party's practice of sending infiltrators into rival
organizations of both the left and right in order to manipulate or disrupt
their activities. The CPUSA's direct complicity in the murder of Leon Trotsky
and the unsuccessful attempt to break his murderer from prison. The party's use
of its members who were college faculty and students to harass faculty who
actively supported Trotsky, and its use of its influence in liberal advocacy groups
to deny forums and lecture venues to those did not accept the party's views on
Trotsky. The party's use of its adherents in trade unions to support the
party's political tactics and adjusting collective bargaining goals to conform
to party political strategy.

Confronting these facts also requires an assessment of what it says about
the nature of the Communist party and of Communists themselves. What does it
tell about the mentality of American Communists that when family member of the
emigrant Communist Finnish-Americans who had been imprisoned and murdered in
the hundreds by Stalin's political police were, when they returned to the U.S.,
warned by the party and fellow Communists that if they talked in public about
what had happened to their relatives they would be ostracized and discredited
by the party? What does it say about the mentality of American Communists when
the Young Communist League's journal cheered on the execution of Trotskyists in
the USSR and puts in capital letters the statement "DEATH! THIS SHOULD
BE THE MESSAGE OF EVERY YOUNG WORKER TO OUR ENEMY CLASS, THE BOSSES OF THE
WORLD" (Young Worker, 27 Nov. 1930) or when a leading Communist
poet writes in the party's literary journal of the need for Communists to
develop a literary language with "the power to hate" (New Masses
April 1929), or when the Communist historian Herbert Aptheker writes that
America society is "so putrid .. that it no longer dares permit the people
to live at all" (History and Reality, 1955)? What does it say of
the willingness of Communists union activists to substitute the CPUSA's
priorities for those of union members that the Minnesota CIO, then
Communist-led and in obedience to the CPUSA support of the Nazi-Soviet Pact,
denounced President Roosevelt in 1940 as one of the "enemies of the
People," called for a third-party to offer an alternative to FDR, and
called on workers to cast black ballots in the presidential election rather
than vote for FDR?

These matters of fact and what they say of the nature of the American
Communist movement and of American Communists are serious matters. But there is
also a basic matter of ethical perspective that still separates Schrecker and
Isserman's views from mine. They write in all seriousness of Communists working
to "create a more democratic and egalitarian society." What they and
I mean by a "democratic" society differ not in minor but in major
ways. Democracy is a concept with varied meanings but at bottom it is a term
for popular self-government and the procedures that allow a people to ensure
that rulers are answerable to the ruled. Democracy recognizes the only
legitimate government as one that receives the freely given consent of the
governed. This nation was founded as a democratic republic and much of our
history revolves around the expansion of the democratic polity and democratic
liberties to include excluded groups. Most Americans regard the basic
requirements of democracy, free elections, free press, freedom of assembly, and
freedom of religion and conscience, as essential American characteristics.
America's creation and sustaining of a far from perfect but nonetheless working
political democracy on a national scale is its greatest achievement and a
triumph of human history. Communists in theory (Marxism-Leninism) and in
practice (advocating Stalin's Russia as the model of the good society) rejected
the fundamental requirements of a democratic society. Such a profoundly
antidemocratic movement was not a vehicle for making American more democratic
but for making it less, indeed, for making it a tyranny.

I have held a variety of views on politics, from the social democratic left
to the conservative right, but always regarding democracy as a fundamental
value that was beyond current policy disagreements and partisanship. When on
the left I felt more political kinship with right-wing democrats than with any
left tyranny, and when on the right more solidarity with left democrats than
any right-wing dictatorship. In America at large this is not a lonely position:
most Americans reject tyranny of either the right or the left. There is, of
course, a minority that does not take this view. Recently a regular opinion
columnist in the influential Washington Post dismissed the lack of
democracy in Cuba because Castro "has educated Cuba's children and given
its people universal health care" (Judy Mann, "Still Crazy About
Cuba," 12 July 2000). And in the world of academic scholars who deal with
20th century history, the dominant view is similar: that a left-wing tyranny is
preferable to a right-wing democracy, that an anticapitalist dictatorship is
morally worthier than a capitalist democracy.

This is the basic divide. This is also the ideological divide that separated
anti-Communist liberals of the ADA and Truman's Cold War Democrats from Popular
Front liberals and Henry Wallace progressives. In May 1946, The New Republic
carried a long letter-to-the-editor from James Loeb, head of the Union for
Democratic Action, that in retrospect was the first shot in a nationwide civil
war over the direction of liberalism. Loeb wrote that liberalism's problem in
the postwar period was ideological rather than organizational. Loeb argued that
an alliance between liberals and Communists betrayed liberalism bedrock
democratic values and in view of the Communist party's totalitarian ideology,
liberals could not associate with it without compromising their moral
integrity. Further, he argued that revival of the New Deal coalition depended
on severing the link developing in the public's mind between liberals and
Soviet tyranny forged by liberals who defended or ignored Stalin's conduct. In
January 1947 the UDA reorganized itself into the Americans for Democratic
Action (ADA). Opposing the ADA was the Progressive Citizens of America, later
to become the Progressive Party, that quietly welcome Communists into the
organization, regarded them as an essential part of the New Deal coalition, and
whose leadership vigorously discouraged criticism of either communism or the
Soviet Union. Anti-Communist liberals won that struggle, of course, with the
election of Truman and Wallace's dismal showing in 1948. The victory was then
consolidated with the expulsion of Communists from the CIO in 1949 and 1950.

The success of anti-Communist liberalism in the 1940s is a central concern
of Isserman and Schrecker's essay, which is subtitled "Current Espionage
Fears Have Given New Life to Liberal Anticommunism." They complain of
speakers at a recent scholarly conference who delivered "some variant of
the standard wisdom of cold war liberalism" and of a New York Times
Magazine article that praised anti-Communist liberals of that era for being
"the one group that basically got Communism right." Schrecker and
Isserman vigorously assert that "cold war liberalism did not, in fact,
`get it right.'"

But who did `get it right'? At one point Isserman and Schrecker seem to say
that nobody got it all right or all wrong, writing that it "would be a
simpler world to understand if the devils and the angels would all line up
neatly on one side or the other of contested terrain..... crystal-clear vistas,
in which all the actors knew then what we know now -- about Stalin, about the
Soviet Union..."

The first point that ought to be noted is that back in the 1930s and 1940s
some people did know about Stalin and the USSR and historians ought to ask why
others did not. Why did and what does it say of the mental world of American
Communists and their Popular Front allies that they so thoroughly misunderstood
Stalin and his regime?

The second point is whether Schrecker and Isserman really mean that we
should recognize that there were devils and angels on both sides. They allow
that most traditionalist historians have seen the anti-Communist side as having
both angels and devils, the latter personified as Joseph McCarthy. They are
ready to admit, as many revisionists in the past would not, that the Communist
side had some devils. But they also want "Radosh, Klehr and Haynes"
to recognize some angels on the Communist side by fitting "Scottsboro, Flint
and Jarama into the story." And we should, indeed we already have,
although not with the vigor that they wish. In my first book, Dubious
Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party (1984) I discussed the
initiatives taken by Hubert Humphrey to attack entrenched anti-black racism in
Minneapolis when he was elected mayor in 1945. I also noted that "during
the late 1930s and early 1940s Communists prepared the way for Humphrey's
effort by bringing the plight of the Minneapolis black community to the
attention of liberals" who had earlier ignored the issue. I also discussed
at some length the key role Communist union militants played in the early
organization of the CIO Steelworkers union in Northern Minnesota and the
electrical workers in the Twin Cities. Klehr in his 1984 The Heyday of
American Communism: The Depression Decade discussed the strengths and
successes of the CPUSA as well as its failings and shortcoming.

Schrecker and Isserman call for judging American Communists in
"context" and with "nuance," and so they should be. But
anti-Communists should also be judged in context and with nuance, and Schrecker
and Isserman do not even try. In their view the anti-Communist side consists
only of demons without an angel in sight. In their essay anti-Communist
liberalism, anti-Communist conservatism, and their spokesman are criticized and
condemned, and neither commendable intent nor accomplishment is even hinted at.
While they now agree that Communists didn't get it all right, they still
believe anti-Communists got it all wrong. The essay, of course, is short, but
Schrecker in her lengthy Many Are the Crimes devotes hundreds of pages
to demonizing opposition to communism in any form. Fervid opposition to
communism, Schrecker explained, "tap[ped] into something dark and nasty in
the human soul," and she held that it contributed to most of the ills of
American society since 1945. Many are the Crimes indicted anticommunism
for destroying the civil rights movement's ties to the "anti-imperialist
left" and, deprived of its Communist element, "most civil rights
groups in the 1950s were conservative, respectable, and small -- and posed
little challenge to the entrenched Southern way of life." Schrecker
states, "the anticommunist crusade bears much of the responsibility"
for ills of the labor movement "for it diverted the mainstream unions from
organizing the unorganized." Anti-Communists also bore responsibility for
the failure of national health insurance, increased inefficiency in government,
the slow development of feminism, elimination of talented musicians from
orchestras, dull television programming, Hollywood's "unthinking
patriotism of the war movies, the global triumphalism of the bible epics, and
the constricted sexuality of the romantic comedies," "marginalizing
entire schools of representation and severing the connection between art and
social responsibility," retarding the progress of science, crippling
higher education, and Richard Nixon's abuse of presidential powers. Finally,
Schrecker stated "only now, under the impact of a globalized, yet
atomized, capitalist system, political repression may have become so diffuse
that we do not recognize it when it occurs." This is not a mixed message
with a contextualized, nuanced historical assessment. It is a simple world in
which anti-Communists of all types are devils.

The Schrecker-Isserman essay is also an indication that the ground for the
debate between revisionists and traditionalists is shifting from the history of
communism to anticommunism. Schrecker in the introduction to her Many Are
the Crimes noted, too sweepingly but with considerable accuracy in regard
to the academic world, that "there is a near-universal consensus that much
of what happened during the late 1940s and 1950s was misguided or worse."
This consensus, however, takes as a premise the revisionist view that the CPUSA
was a normal, albeit radical, political movement, more rooted in American
traditions than subordinate to Moscow, and had no significant involvement with
Soviet espionage. But as Schrecker and Isserman allow in their essay, this
premise cannot stand in the face of the new evidence. And with that premise
crumbling, the "near-universal consensus" on anticommunism is giving
way, and, to the alarm of Isserman and Schrecker, there is "new life to
liberal anticommunism." Their essay is in part an attempt to shore up the
consensus and state a new line, a willingness to rethink American communism but
not anticommunism. This is intellectually a hopeless task. Anticommunism was a
stance rather than a movement. There was no anti-Communist party around which
the movement was built nor a core anti-Communist ideology. Anti-Communists were
defined by what they were against rather than what they were for. Rather than a
single anticommunism, there was a multitude, with different objections to
communism. The various anticommunisms did not follow a common agenda aside from
their shared opposition to Communist or even approve of each other.
Consequently, any historical treatment of anticommunism is keyed to the historical
treatment of communism. When a historian changes his or her perception of
communism an accommodating change in the perception of anticommunism logically
follows.

"The Right's Cold War Revision" also raises some other points that
deserve attention. Schrecker and Isserman write, "Hubert Humphrey...,
along with Schlesinger and Niebuhr set up the American for Democratic Action to
protect the Democrats from the waning forces of the far left." The ADA was
established in 1947 and was only a fraction of the size of the Progressive
Citizens of America, the voice of Popular Front liberalism. Far from
"waning," the forces of the far left were mounting their most
ambitious assault on mainstream politics. The background for a political
realignment appeared to exist. The formidable New Deal coalition seemed to be
falling apart. Truman's presidency was in deep political trouble and he looked
like a loser in 1948. The Democrats, having lost both houses of Congress in the
1946, feared that a Truman defeat in 1948 would solidify the Republican
congressional majority. Communists and their Popular Front allies aggressively
attempted to move out from their subordinate position on the left wing of
Democratic party by creating the Progressive party as a mainstream political player
which would displace the Democrats as the political vehicle for liberal and
labor forces. This bold gamble failed disastrously in the 1948 election. After
that, indeed, the far left was waning. But the "waning" was in part
brought about because of the formation and the subsequent work of the ADA.
Schrecker and Isserman's sentence puts the cart before the horse in order to
claim that no horse was needed.

Similarly the essay confuses chronology and cites the success of
anticommunism directed at Soviet espionage as evidence that the anticommunism
was not needed. They cite evidence showing that by the early 1950s the once
extensive KGB networks in the U.S. no longer existed and suggest that the
search for spies was unneeded. Those networks had ceased to exist because the
combination of the civic anti-Communist political campaigns and the
government's internal security programs had made the continued use of the
CPUSA, the chief recruiting pool earlier used by the KGB for its sources and
espionage helpers, insecure and impractical. To stick to our equine clichés, at
some point in the 1950s government security programs and public anticommunism
had so thoroughly destroyed the once formidable Soviet intelligence network in
the U.S. that it became a matter of flogging a dead horse, but Schrecker and
Isserman want to say that there never was a horse and no flogging was ever
needed, but they are incorrect on both counts.

Schrecker and Isserman also have some curious comments about espionage. At
one point they say, "throughout US history, citizens have forged their own
ties -- sometimes openly, sometimes secretly -- with foreign governments with
which they sympathized.In judging
those contacts, context counts." At one level this is a historical truism.
Of course context counts. Not all or even most sympathetic contacts with
foreign governments constitute betrayal of the United States or espionage
against it. And while there are some occasional `gray area' cases, in general
any competent historian can sort out espionage and betrayal from benign or just
unobjectionable activity. It is difficult to see what the point of this remark
is except as an attempt to lessen the sting of American Communists spying for
Moscow by normalizing espionage. They then move to the bizarre by calling for
some "enterprising historian" to find the "British `mole' in
Washington" as well as the spies placed there by France and China. They
then ask if we found these British, French and Chinese moles would we
"excoriate them as mush as we do the folks who leaked information to our
other wartime ally in the Kremlin." Probably this is only rhetorical
fluff, but if seriously intended, it suggests they have a distorted
understanding of how Britain, France, and China dealt with the United States in
World War II. And their question contradicts their own admonition that
"context counts." Spying for Churchill and De Gaulle is not the same
as spying for Stalin. Illegal, certainly, morally reprehensible, to be sure,
deserving of punishment, of course, as a threat to American interests, American
democracy, and American security, however, just not in the same league as
spying for Moscow.

Also, Schrecker and Isserman state, "it is hard to retain a sense of
proportion about espionage. Merely to evoke it risks killing off any attempt at
intellectual fine shading." In fact, historians have had no such
difficulties in retaining a sense of proportion when dealing with German and
Japanese espionage against the U.S. in World War II, German espionage against
the U.S. in World War I, spying by both sides in our own Civil War, and the
extensive espionage of our war of independence with its confused allegiances of
loyalists and patriots. The one area of historical consideration of espionage
that evokes wildly disproportionate reaction is Communist espionage. If some
enterprising historian does find a British mole in WWII Washington, it will be
of considerable historical interest and the research will be scrutinized
because it would be both new and unexpected. But there would not be the sort of
campaign of vilification waged both inside the historical profession and
outside against Allen Weinstein for his study of Alger Hiss's espionage or
against Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton for their study of the Rosenberg case.
It is the strong contingent of hard left historians in the profession who have
blocked proportionality about Communist-linked espionage by greeting attempts
to study it with enraged cries of `how dare you!' (Isserman was not among
these: he publicly defended Radosh's study of the on the Rosenberg case when it
first appeared.)

Since the 1970s hard left historians, with the acquiescence of the bulk of
the profession, have largely consigned scholars who write critical histories of
American communism, critical histories of Soviet espionage, or sympathetic
histories of American domestic anticommunism to the margins of the profession.
Those historians who write on American communism and anticommunism in a
traditionalist fashion have, depending on whom and how many you wish to
identify, written scores of scholarly books, some of them path breaking
original research, published by a variety of respected university presses. Yet
these same scholars are excluded from publishing essays in the profession's
most prestigious journals, the Journal of American History and the American
Historical Review. Lowell Dyson's 1972 "The Red Peasant International
in America" was the last time any of these traditionalists had an essay on
domestic communism, anticommunism, or Soviet espionage published in the Journal
of American History. The American Historical Review has a similar
record of excluding traditionalists. On the other hand, over these past
thirty-seven years these two journals have published dozens of essays by
revisionist scholars on one or another aspect of American communism (positive)
and anticommunism (harshly negative). I suppose that the editors of these
journals, smugly seconded by revisionists, will deny that any school of
historical interpretation is denied access if its writings meet the exacting
scholarly standards of their journals and its just unfortunate that
traditionalists just aren't up the mark. But the latter is balderdash, and the
former doesn't stand the smell test. Twenty-seven years and not a single
traditionalist essay makes the grade? As they used to say in the party,
`Comrades, it is no accident.'

Annoyingly, Schrecker and Isserman's essay also throws in some of the
conceits and pettiness too common among hard left academics. They disparage
historians who write in a traditionalist mode as hired guns of the vast
right-wing conspiracy (the Olin and Bradley foundations) and insist that even
"the more serious anti-Communist historians" are infected with an
"anti-sixties animus" and they not-too-slyly associate these historians
with "the assaults on affirmative action, the welfare state and all the
other legacies, real and imagined, of the sixties" and "a broader
campaign to delegitimize the academy, long targeted by contemporary
conservatives as the last stronghold of the sixties radicals." "One
need not be a conspiracy theorist" to believe this, they insist, but
actually you do. Their portrait of traditionalists as mercenary conspirators is
part leftist fantasy and part a distasteful resort to ad hominem tactics.